Anthea Black
Studio / Artist Publishing / Writing + Books / Curating / Teaching
Grieve Weave 1 - 22
This series of artist’s books integrate prints and weavings that reflect on the passing of loved ones, which has deeply challenged my beliefs on the body and dying. By weaving together multiple stages (the first pull, an offset image, and several "ghost prints") of the print, they are integrated into a single structure, but the woven image still hovers in a hard-to-decipher place. The prints are fleeting and faint, where ghost shapes reappear then fade away. Weaving further intertwines these spaces, and confuses the focal point. Of course, a weaving cannot be read as a traditional book, and yet it has deep historical connections to text, storytelling, and information technologies. Weaving is a form of ancestral knowledge and a companion in the contemplation of grief. The series is not explicitly about identity, but instead about creating book objects that hover alongside it.
As books, the works can be tilted, flipped, opened, re-hung, or re-positioned in multiple directions, and no focal point or "correct" orientation exists in the work itself. This body of work asks similar questions as my curatorial project The Embodied Press: Queer Abstraction and the Artist’s Book. What happens when an image or a book is seductive but difficult to read? Abstraction in the book form defies easy reading; as queer art historian David Getsy writes, “queer abstraction” can act as a form of camouflage, non-disclosure, or method for jamming the surveillance of queer bodies. Navigating queer and transness over two decades of political change, I’m ever more convinced it cannot be entirely understood or legitimized through representation and public visibility. Grieve Weave accesses what is felt or sensed but not entirely visible.
Selected images
Grieve Weave 9 (overlapping grief weave) / Bauhaus wallpaper Ouija tea set, 2023, Artists' book: monoprint on coventry rag and somerset, asahi silk and iris rayon bookcloth.
Grieve Weave 13 (radiating kindness weave) / Bauhaus wallpaper Ouija clutch, 2023, Artists' book: monoprint on woven Somerset paper, Asahi mohair and Iris rayon bookcloth.
Grieve Weave 15 (Clarice Lispector weave) / Bauhaus wallpaper Ouija passport holder, 2024, Artists' book: monoprint and etching on somerset and pescia, letterpress on mohawk superfine, asahi silk bookcloth.
Father / Mother
This series of drawings follows my interest in surrealist techniques and processes that mediate direct representation. The images are drawings and gravestone rubbings, each completed in 1 separate sitting, beginning in daylight, observing the setting of the sun, then working to twilight, and finally into the night when the drawing must be finished without the aid of light. The finished drawings are left overnight in darkness and collected in the morning. The first pairing FATHER / MOTHER was produced after my father died in 2019. The second pairing MOTHER / FATHER was produced after my mother died in 2021. The third pairing was made in 2022, and the fourth in 2025.
Selected images
FATHER / MOTHER, 2019-2025, graphite on kozo, (detail), each drawing 22 x 30 inches. Series of durational drawings produced over 6 years.
FATHER / MOTHER, 2019-2025, graphite on kozo, (detail), each drawing 22 x 30 inches. Series of durational drawings produced over 6 years.
Mirror Drawing book
Singularity is always already plural; individuals are at once unique in their differences and relational to others. Anthea Black and Thea Yabut create drawings, book works, prints, photographs, and composite films simultaneously together and individually, each mimicking the other’s movements and marks on the surface or page. This repetitive relationality has an allegory in pattern, which is a succession of singularities brought together and recapitulated in all directions. The uneven quality and weight of the lines registered in their Mirror Drawings allows difference and uncertainty to slip into repetition. The gesture of each artist is the same but the effect is not. Every movement contains its own possibility. Repetition and mirroring are processes that don’t disappear into the image; rather Black and Yabut’s images make these processes visible, registering the hands—the materiality—of the artists together and differently.
-Jen Kennedy, excerpt from Mirror Drawing curatorial text
Selected images
Mirror Drawing book, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, graphite on paper, 2015.
Exhibition
MIRROR DRAWING, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, La Centrale / Gallérie Powerhouse, Montréal, Quebec, March 17 to April 14, 2017.
Mirror Drawing book, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, graphite on paper, 2015.
Exhibition
MIRROR DRAWING, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, La Centrale / Gallérie Powerhouse, Montréal, Quebec, March 17 to April 14, 2017.
Two Fold: twice as great or as numerous
Two fold is a wall-mounted accordion book that consists of 84 cut-paper panels. A collaboration between Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, Two fold begins with their ongoing "mirror drawing" studio game, and their practice of using scissors and knives as a drawing tool. Working from the centre and cutting outwards, the pair creates a third inner space that exists at the meeting point between two pages, echoing Homi Bhabha's idea of the third space as an iterative, continuously expanding code.
The accordion book binding method and installation, devised by Anthea Black, allows each page to hover seamlessly on the gallery wall.
Images
Two Fold: twice as great or as numerous, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, Binding by Anthea Black, Cut Somerset book paper, 2016-2017.
Two Fold: twice as great or as numerous, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, Binding by Anthea Black, Cut Somerset book paper, 2016-2017.
Exhibition
MIRROR DRAWING, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, La Centrale / Gallérie Powerhouse, Montréal, Quebec, March 17 to April 14, 2017.
MIRROR DRAWING, Anthea Black and Thea Yabut, La Centrale / Gallérie Powerhouse, Montréal, Quebec, March 17 to April 14, 2017.
Gay Premises wallpaper
Two wallpapers and a handful of printed ephemera strewn across the wall from the Body Politic and Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives. These wallpapers place queer liberation work and police interference in queer life side-by-side, referencing the police raids of the Body Politic offices, and seizure of hundreds of documents central to the newspaper’s archive.
Images
“I held you,” screenprinted in lavender, collages banners from gay and lesbian liberation marches in the 1970s and 80s, all sourced from the photographic archives at CLGA.
“Police sight-lines / GAY TORONTO,” screenprinted in blue, uses blueprints of the Body Politic offices and local maps to show pervasiveness of police surveillance of queer culture and activism from the 1970s to today.
Images
“I held you,” screenprinted in lavender, collages banners from gay and lesbian liberation marches in the 1970s and 80s, all sourced from the photographic archives at CLGA.
“Police sight-lines / GAY TORONTO,” screenprinted in blue, uses blueprints of the Body Politic offices and local maps to show pervasiveness of police surveillance of queer culture and activism from the 1970s to today.
Exhibition and Permanent Installation
Gay Premises: Artists and Art Workers respond to the Body Politic: 1973-1983, Curated by Erin Silver The ArQuives (formerly Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives), Toronto, Canada, 2016-ongoing.
Gay Premises: Artists and Art Workers respond to the Body Politic: 1973-1983, Curated by Erin Silver The ArQuives (formerly Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives), Toronto, Canada, 2016-ongoing.
Gay Premises: Artists and Art Workers respond to the Body Politic: 1973-1983, Curated by Erin Silver
Taken in tandem with the recent surge in interest, among younger and increasingly diverse generations of queer academic, activist, and artistic communities, in mining queer archives, Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983, timely in its confluence with the CLGA’s 40th anniversary, operates at the threshold between Canada’s gay liberation past as a complex and contested foundation for the queer present and its potential futures. Part of the process of broadening and complicating the record of gay liberation histories across Canada involves reinterpretation and rearticulation via artistic interventions at the CLGA. Promoting intergenerational dialogue and calling on an emerging generation of queer artists, activists, curators, and historians to engage in processes of “activating” the archive towards its continued preservation, the idea of archives “passing the torch” here is transformed into a playful, experimental, and collaborative endeavour, conceived along the lines of tag: “tag, you’re it,” tag teams, as well as “tag” and “tagging” as references to digital processes for organizing and archiving information.
TAG TEAM: Gay Premises provides an artistic vantage point for thinking about Canada’s gay liberation history and the 40-year history of the CLGA. As a collaborative, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary project, artists are tagged in for short residencies throughout the exhibition, working with the material, ideological, and textual traces left by previous artist participants and producing interventions, performances, and objects that contribute to a critical exploration of Canada’s gay liberation history, the CLGA, and the way that GLBTQ+ histories are promoted and preserved. TAG TEAM: Gay Premises emphasizes process and performative relationships to the archive, as well as a perception of contemporary queer artist communities working across networks, in collaboration, and through dialogue. The curatorial premise of TAG TEAM: Gay Premises as a whole might be read as an artistic intervention into a reading of the archive as static and relegated to the past, the structure of the project expanding and changing as new artists are tagged in. The projects are located at the CLGA, as well as at other sites in Toronto that are relevant to the history of The Body Politic, Canada’s gay liberation history, and the CLGA.
A four-artist tag team will undertake curatorial and artistic interventions throughout the course of Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983. Sharlene Bamboat & Dina Georgis, Anthea Black, Eugenio Salas, and Robert Waters have been tagged in because their practices address issues that are of critical importance to the enduring promotion, preservation, and legitimacy of GLBTQ+ archives, including racial and gender exclusion in GLBTQ+ histories, the oft-silenced experiences of queer refugees, the historical possibilities afforded by intergenerational relationships, and the reappropriation of gay liberation imagery and iconography towards queer ends. The simple act of calling on each artist to tag in their successor poses a challenge to any pre-determined historical narrative of the CLGA and promotes the development of a “living archive” that can effectively adapt to the needs, desires, and political urgencies of each new generation wishing to see itself reflected in the archive’s holdings.
-Erin Silver, excerpt from curatorial text
Taken in tandem with the recent surge in interest, among younger and increasingly diverse generations of queer academic, activist, and artistic communities, in mining queer archives, Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983, timely in its confluence with the CLGA’s 40th anniversary, operates at the threshold between Canada’s gay liberation past as a complex and contested foundation for the queer present and its potential futures. Part of the process of broadening and complicating the record of gay liberation histories across Canada involves reinterpretation and rearticulation via artistic interventions at the CLGA. Promoting intergenerational dialogue and calling on an emerging generation of queer artists, activists, curators, and historians to engage in processes of “activating” the archive towards its continued preservation, the idea of archives “passing the torch” here is transformed into a playful, experimental, and collaborative endeavour, conceived along the lines of tag: “tag, you’re it,” tag teams, as well as “tag” and “tagging” as references to digital processes for organizing and archiving information.
TAG TEAM: Gay Premises provides an artistic vantage point for thinking about Canada’s gay liberation history and the 40-year history of the CLGA. As a collaborative, intergenerational, and interdisciplinary project, artists are tagged in for short residencies throughout the exhibition, working with the material, ideological, and textual traces left by previous artist participants and producing interventions, performances, and objects that contribute to a critical exploration of Canada’s gay liberation history, the CLGA, and the way that GLBTQ+ histories are promoted and preserved. TAG TEAM: Gay Premises emphasizes process and performative relationships to the archive, as well as a perception of contemporary queer artist communities working across networks, in collaboration, and through dialogue. The curatorial premise of TAG TEAM: Gay Premises as a whole might be read as an artistic intervention into a reading of the archive as static and relegated to the past, the structure of the project expanding and changing as new artists are tagged in. The projects are located at the CLGA, as well as at other sites in Toronto that are relevant to the history of The Body Politic, Canada’s gay liberation history, and the CLGA.
A four-artist tag team will undertake curatorial and artistic interventions throughout the course of Gay Premises: Radical Voices in the Archives, 1973-1983. Sharlene Bamboat & Dina Georgis, Anthea Black, Eugenio Salas, and Robert Waters have been tagged in because their practices address issues that are of critical importance to the enduring promotion, preservation, and legitimacy of GLBTQ+ archives, including racial and gender exclusion in GLBTQ+ histories, the oft-silenced experiences of queer refugees, the historical possibilities afforded by intergenerational relationships, and the reappropriation of gay liberation imagery and iconography towards queer ends. The simple act of calling on each artist to tag in their successor poses a challenge to any pre-determined historical narrative of the CLGA and promotes the development of a “living archive” that can effectively adapt to the needs, desires, and political urgencies of each new generation wishing to see itself reflected in the archive’s holdings.
-Erin Silver, excerpt from curatorial text
looking for love in all the wrong places
looking for love in all the wrong places is an artist-curatorial project that commissions and disseminates limited edition silkscreen posters and multiples by queer artists for public spaces. When it began in 2006, the project was a call for collaboration and community building across a vast prairie geography, and it has since enabled queer dialogues and partnerships to emerge in public spaces in Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Portland, Austin, Dallas, Chicago, San Francisco, New York, Berlin and beyond.
Collaborations with: Daryl Vocat (Toronto), Megan Morman and Cindy Baker (Saskatoon), Wednesday Lupypciw (Calgary), Carol Maxwell (Texas) and Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan (Winnipeg).
An archive of all posters produced from 2006 - 2010 appeared as part of Gestures of Resistance, curated by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leemann at the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland in 2010.